Changer of Worlds

Getting in shouldn’t be a problem, she concluded. Getting out again might be another matter, but if they succeeded in taking Saint-Just alive, they’d have an extremely persuasive spokesman to get them past the defenses. And if they didn’t succeed in taking him alive—or at least in killing him—then they and all the members of their families were extremely unlikely to survive the scorched earth purges which were certain to follow. Nausea churned at the thought, but she didn’t have time for that. The operation had been pla

She turned to the pilot.

“Turn us around, Pete. It looks like we’re going calling on the Citizen Secretary at his office, after all.” She bared her teeth in a predatory grin. “I hope he won’t be too upset that we didn’t call ahead for an appointment.”

Mikis Tsakakis yawned and stretched, then grimaced and reached for his coffee cup once more. Few things were more boring than watching someone else sit at a desk and do paperwork. But boring was good. Any bodyguard would unhesitatingly agree with that sentiment, he reflected, then snorted in mild amusement at his own thoughts and took a sip of coffee.

He glanced at a side display that monitored traffic around the tower. What happened outside was neither his concern nor his responsibility, but at this motherless hour any distraction was welcome.

Not that there was very much to see. StateSec’s critical departments worked around the clock, of course, but the population of the tower was less than half as large for the night shift, and the air car parking garages were correspondingly sparsely occupied. He skimmed idly through the various levels, and grimaced again. There was no real difference in the light levels within the vast internal caverns, yet somehow they seemed dimmer and more deserted at such an early hour.

He watched a civilian air van ease in through one of the automated security portals and quirked an eyebrow. The van was unmarked, but then, a lot of SS vehicles were unmarked, and he wondered what covert operation this one was assigned to.

Alina Gricou very carefully did not sigh in relief as the security systems accepted the admittance code. General Conflans had assured her that they’d managed to get their hands on valid perimeter security codes, and she trusted the general with her life, or she wouldn’t have been here in the first place. But she was also a veteran who had learned the First Law of Combat decades ago: Shit Happens. She made it a point to assume that any intelligence briefing would be full of crap, because that way any surprises would be pleasant ones.

Unfortunately, she’d had very few surprises in that particular regard.

This time looked like an exception, however, and she watched the schematic in her visor HUD as her pilot worked his carefully casual way towards the proper parking stall.

The sound of explosions woke him.

He didn’t realize at once that they were explosions. He hadn’t slept well in years, but he’d managed to sleep far more deeply tonight than usual, and at first, he thought it was simply a distant thunderstorm. But as he roused from sound sleep to groggy wakefulness he realized that it couldn’t be thunder. The Chairman’s Suite lay at the very heart of the People’s Tower, and it was far too well soundproofed for mere thunder to disturb its occupant.

He roused further and sat up quickly in bed, and his pulse quickened as more explosions sounded. They were coming closer, and he rolled out of bed and fumbled his bare feet into a pair of shoes even as his hand darted under the pillow and came out with a heavy, military-issue pulser.

The door to his bedroom flew open, and he spun in a half-crouch, pulser rising. The man in the sudden opening flung his arms up, and Rob Pierre just barely managed not to squeeze the firing stud as he recognized one of his bodyguards.

“We’ve got to get you out of here, Sir!” the StateSec sergeant exclaimed.

“What’s going on?” Pierre demanded. “Where’s Citizen Lieutenant Adamson?”

“Sir, I don’t know.” The bodyguard’s voice was tight with tension, and the words slurred as they tripped over one another with the clumsiness of panic restrained only by the iron rigor of training. “They’re coming at us from the roof and from below, and they’ve got heavier weapons than we do. Please, Sir! There’s no time for questions—you’ve got to go now, or—”

Pierre was already hurrying towards the door. The fact that the citizen sergeant didn’t even know where Adamson, the commander of his personal security detail for over two T-years, was said terrifying things about what must be happening outside his bedroom. But the man who had made himself master of the People’s Republic of Haven was not the sort to stand paralyzed, like an Old Earth rabbit caught in a ground car’s headlights, in an emergency. The StateSec sergeant’s shoulders relaxed ever so slightly as the man he was responsible for protecting with his own life began to move, and he turned and stepped back out into the hallway first.

Pierre was almost surprised by the power of his own fear as the entire tower seemed to quiver to the fury of explosions and approaching combat. He’d thought that after so many death warrants, so much blood, he and Death were old friends. But they weren’t, and he was astounded to discover that despite all his weariness and all the times he had wished there were some way—anyway—to dismount from the tiger of the People’s Republic, he wanted desperately to live.

A haze of smoke and dust hung in the luxuriously carpeted passageway, and he could hear the wailing warble of fire alarms as temperature sensors responded to the inferno ripping its way towards his suite. The citizen sergeant had been joined by three other StateSec troopers. One had a light tribarrel, but the other three carried only pulse rifles, and, aside from the citizen sergeant, not one of them was from his regular detail. But the obviously scratch-built team seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and with the citizen sergeant directly behind them, they formed a flying wedge, moving down the corridor at a half-run. Pierre knew they were headed for the emergency dropshaft hidden in his private conference room, and he spared a moment to pray that whoever was behind this attack didn’t know about the shaft or where it emerged.

And then, suddenly, it didn’t matter whether they knew or not. Pierre felt the overpressure on his back as another explosion, louder than any of the others, roared behind him. The citizen sergeant spun around to face him, right hand bringing up his pulser while his left reached out, grabbed the Citizen Chairman by the collar of his pajamas and literally flung him further up the passage. Pierre’s feet left the floor, and he sailed forward like some ungainly bird, until one of the pulse rifle-armed StateSec men caught him and slammed him to the floor.

Citizen Chairman Rob Pierre felt the StateSec trooper’s weight come down on him. Knew the bodyguard was protecting him with his own body. Saw the citizen sergeant go down on one knee, raising his pulser in the two-handed grip of a man on a pistol range. Heard the tribarrel wine and hiss as a chainsaw of darts sizzled back up the passage. The citizen sergeant was firing now, full auto, filling the air with death, and none of it mattered at all. The figures striding through the smoke and newborn flame where the explosive charge had breached the corridor wall loomed up out of the inferno like ungainly trolls, swollen and misshapen in the soot-black of battle armor. The hurricane of pulser darts sparkled and flashed with spiteful beauty as they ricocheted from that armor, but not even the tribarrel was heavy enough to penetrate it. The ricochets were a lethal cloud, rebounding from the armored figures to lacerate what was left of the corridor walls, and Pierre knew that every one of his bodyguards must realize that they had no chance at all against Marine battle armor.